We Couldn’t Become Adults 
ボクたちはみんな大人になれなかった 「Bokutachi wa Minna Otona ni Narenakatta」
Release Date: November 05th, 2021
Duration: 124 mins.
Director: Yoshihiro Mori
Writer: Ryo Takada (Script), Moegara (Original Novel),
Starring: Mirai Moriyama, Sairi Itoh, Masahiro Higashide, Sumire, Yuko Oshima, Amane Okayama, Atsushi Shinohara,
Two 40-somethings, a graphics designer and a former Golden Gai bar host roll, around in a pile of garbage bags of Covid-locked Tokyo while lamenting life and loneliness. One stands up and says,
“Eighty per cent of the people in this world are trash. Twenty per cent are scum. I think that there is at least one per cent of people who are alright.”
These are the words of the film’s main protagonist, Makoto Sato (Mirai Moriyama), a cynical man who, despite living comfortably, carries disaffection and disappointment in his heart and maybe depression in his head. He may be repeating words said by his friend who remains lying in the trash but a look of regret passes over Makoto’s face as he is rebuked and, in the fading haze of a drunken stupor, he looks back on his life to see why he feels this way and, as the title suggests, he never became an adult.
We Couldn’t Become Adults is a fine ensemble drama made for Netflix. It stars Mirai Moriyama (The Drudgery Train), Sairi Itoh (Love and Other Cults), Masahiro Higashide (The Sound of Grass), Atsushi Shinohara (Three Stories of Love), Sumire (Tourism), Yuko Oshima (All the Things We Never Said), Amane Okayama (Poetry Angel), and Masato Hagiwara (Cure).
The reverse-chronology story structure is a series of nested flashbacks that take audiences back through the 2000s and the 90s to show important moments and people in Makoto’s life and how his reactions to them shaped the cynical and bitter man we are introduced to at the start.
This is no Peppermint Candy (1999) where audiences are treated to an intellectually and emotionally rich story where the main protag’s life and major cultural moments are ways to analyse masculinity and how society and its systems warp people’s behaviour. Rather, this is mostly a gentle nostalgia-infused existential examination of a man who lacked the courage to realise his dreams and lost his one true love, a moment that ruined him.
As the film slips backwards through time, we see, in many stylishly shot scenes, more naïve, optimistic versions of Makoto. The one who worked hard and had dreams. We experience formative encounters with various people, such as a louche co-worker at the graphics company, a Shinjuku bar hostess, a yakuza, a gay friend/drag queen and various girlfriends – including Kaori (Sairi Ito), – the one who got away. They lifted him up at times of despair and gave direction. These people offered good advice, true friendship, support, empathy, and love but at every turn Makoto let them slip away.
We see there are countervailing forces of work demands brought on by the 2000s tech boom and horrible bosses. They give him an excuse to avoid changing his life or exposing himself to the needs of others but that does not explain why he makes so many mistakes. It becomes apparent that, deep down, there is a cowardice that makes him resist others and that created a negative feedback loop. That includes denying his own feelings and dreams: a novel he gives up on, aspirations of foreign travel. Things that others take in his stead. It culmiantes in a broken engagement. Facebook friend requests in his present-tense incarnation remind him of how the people he spurned have moved on with life and left him literally in a mound of garbage.
This story is nothing revelatory but it is well constructed and well acted. It is fascinating looking in on his life for many reasons:
- The slow puzzle-piece-like revealing of how Makoto’s past informs his present,
- Smoothly used pop culture references that will transport Gen-Xers and millennials back in time. Do you remember Sony Minidiscs, and pagers?
That last point will work better for Japanese audiences who will appreciate hearing Denki Groove and Kenji Ozawa through the speakers and seeing various fashions from an earlier age on the screen. There is also the Nostradamus prophecy, so big as the millennium approached (as referenced in a recent MOOSIC Lab film). However, the further back we go, the more there is the sense that the world didn’t seem so bleak and neither did Makoto’s life and on that point, it feels like this is a film that will work with older viewers.
While I am not the same age as Makoto, I am approaching it and the reminiscences and the sense of looking back and wondering “what if?” did chime with me a lot.
As for that cowardice point, that may seem harsh but there’s a line in Catherine Breillat’s Brief Crossing (2001) where an older woman tells an romantically interested 18-year-old,
“A man who loves a woman doesn’t take precautions.”
I was reminded of that when watching this film. You can see Makoto wither in the crucial moments and opt to play it safe too often and for that to have negative consequences in his life.
The film is delivered in a beautifully shot way that makes good use of light- characters are often bathed in the neon of night-time Tokyo, framing – the gorgeous blue skies as Kaori and Makoto go on a summer drive while upbeat music plays is exhilarating, and focus – seeing a first time experience in a love hotel and close-ups of Kaori asking for the lights to be turned off and a shot of her rubbing her feet together touchingly gets across the shyness and nervousness of her character in a way that is easy to relate to. An overhead shot/crane shot of characters lying in the garbage as they lament life, a person receding into the distance as we get a view of a wing-mirror as a car moves forward. The visuals convey the emotions in the right way while the aspect ratio gets narrower the further back in time we go. The actors also undergo convincing visual transformations with the aforementioned fashions and also hairstyles. More than that, they are able to convincingly portray callower versions of their characters as we see them further on back in time.
Ultimately, I found the film affecting. It was well acted so that the characters felt alive and the beauty of shots were pleasing to the eye but, most of all, I could connect with the main character and I got the chance to dive into a life and experiences and culture over a long period of time and even learned something. This is what cinema is great at doing.
Life is made up of meetings with people who carry significance and the ability to change our lives, although it is sometimes hard to see at the time and even harder to open up to things and to let them change us. This applies to Makoto. His ending is left open but I think viewers will probably be able to relate due to moments in their own lives and they might even want to change their lives in some way or appreciate the people currently in their lives to avoid making the mistakes that Makoto made.